No, the value of a Tesla is that it's a gorgeous car with exceptional styling, beautiful materials, great performance, and decent range. They control some of this with software that I'll never directly interact with, and the nav/AV system is great, but putting a Tesla computer in a Lancer is not going to make people buy Lancers.

My guess is that he means "user perception," and I don't find that claim hard to believe at all. Notice the comments in TFS about 'animations?' One of the (to me) most annoying features of every windows from XP is the extensive use of fade in the user interface. Click on the start button, and it spends 300ms fading into existence. Click on an item, another 300 ms fading a sub-menu into existence. This makes the UI feel horribly sluggish and is the first thing I turn off on a new system. OSX has its own bits of animation, like bouncing a task bar item while it starts up. Maybe these things look great at product demos, but they get in the way of me working: always waiting, just a little bit, for the computer to get around to drawing the menu I asked for.

Point is: if MS turns down or off task bar and menu fade in Win10, it will "feel" much faster than other Windows, and very possibly OSX.

Humans have had actors, singers, and performers for a very long time. Art and drama are more fundamental to who we are than medicine, architecture, or chemistry. If every professional performer disappeared tomorrow, you would still tell stories to your friends, you would still whistle tunelessly, and we would all continue to think you suck at it, desperately wishing for someone with a better sense of timing, rhythm, or tune. The Dark Ages were more a failure of Art than of Science.

It's a lot easier to train someone to be a competent physician or engineer than to train them to be a world class actor/artist. Curiously, it also takes a lot more technical people to do anything useful than it does actors to entertain. GM uses 219,000 people to build 8.5 million cars/year. 38 cars per person: individually, those people are not very useful. Monday Night Football is 20 million people watching 92 players and associated, mostly fungible support personnel. Sure, the car has more value than one football game, but that value is very diffuse. There are tons of entertainers in local/regional theater groups, local bands, and local artists who get paid so little that they have to keep day jobs.

Stop comparing elite artists to average technical workers, and you'll find much less discrepancy. The average programmer gets paid much better than the average guitarist.

Exactly - labels pick up bands once they've demonstrated not just their musical ability, but their ability to be part of the commercial machine. (Setting aside artificial performers created by labels, like The Monkeys or Britney Spears) The labels look for a marketable product, and the best way to identify that is to choose those that already have a modest market and make it bigger.

They're still doing it. Scouring youtube and CreateSpace looking for people who can put out several high-hit pieces, and offering a pathway to "the next level."

The labels may well be great advertisers and great PR people. The question is whether they're worth their price. It seems to me like there's a niche for an a la carte media advertiser who doesn't require copyright transfers, doesn't necessarily run a recording studio, but can get an independent band into some of the promotional areas (eg, radio play) historically monopolized by the labels.

Um, no. That used to be one of the defining features of "folk" music: it didn't have professional performers.

You say the labels perform a valuable service for the performers. I say they create artificial scarcity, say by promoting only one of many "Greek traditional" bands, thus focusing as many potential "Greek traditional" customers into a single offering as possible. Certainly there is some benefit to the group chosen to be the sole commercial representative of that genre, but the purpose of the label is to take for itself as much of that revenue as possible. They're not the artists' share-and-share-alike friend. They're keeping the goose who lays golden eggs. They're a tax on the performance.

As a consumer, I would like to think that my payment benefits the artists, and that someone who sells a million albums at $15 each actually ends up with millions of dollars, not the $50-100k most will actually see. So, as a consumer, I see a label as a used-car salesman standing between me and the performers I would like to reward. Out of the 40x markup between artist and retail, label royalties may only represent 150% markup, but (as a consumer) I tend to lump all of the recording, production, promotion, and distribution cost into "The Label," and that represent somewhere around 20x markup. As a consumer, it's hard for me to understand why a CD that costs $1 to stamp and package, sells for $15, and gets the artist $0.10.

Pretty much. Like when you 'buy' a copy of Office, MS is allowed to turn around and sell it to your competitor. That web dev company has probably created a website for you based on a template they've used a hundred times before, adjusting the details and content for each new client, so they have - for the most part - sold you a web site that they'd already sold to one of your competitors. This is why it's important to spell out the ownership and rights to works created under contract - code, art, text content.

That's an excellent quote, but it probably means exactly the opposite of what you think. When Bastiat says "plunder," he means "take by taxation, regulation, or legislation." He would probably argue that a businessman (or company) is perfectly within its natural rights to negotiate any level of compensation and any form of contract, and that it is not possible for either a corporation to "plunder" its employees nor for one group of workers to "plunder" another. It's a little hard for me to guess whether he would consider the legally restrictive system of H1b to be "plundering" the foreign workers, based on the non-monetary power of residence granted to the employer. He would probably consider the limited availability of both H1b and permanent resident visas to be "plundering" from businesses by creating an artificial scarcity of labor.

That seems to be the point of the summary: that the study found small levels of contamination in a fairly confined region and were able to track that contamination (likely) to an uncharacteristic defect in one production facility. It sounds like a thoughtful, reasonable description that responsible producers could take as a warning to pay extra attention to storage facilities. Thus all the more disturbing that the producers' response was to go into full-bore discredit the tree-hugging scientists mode. Like when your doctor says "it's a cold: take two asprin and call me in the morning," and you sue him for diagnosing a non-existent tumor and botching the brain surgery.

According to some calculations the margin on Internet is around 97%, while the margin on video is only 55%. After all, the cable company doesn't actually have to share Internet revenue with any of the content creators, but powerful TV content, like ESPN, TNT, TBS, and FOX, can demand awfully high royalties from the cable cos. The physical infrastructure is identical, and most of it was laid to provide video. They basically get the internet for free.

The broadcasters know, though. 5 years ago, I had OTA access to 7 channels. Since then, most of those have split (ie, channel 2.1, 2.2, 2.3), adding an all-weather channel, an all-crime channel, and half a dozen channels with reruns of MASH, Gunsmoke, and Star Trek (ToS). There's 14 OTA channels now, and I don't think the expansion is done.

My neighbor's got bare coax running 50' from their house, looped around nails along a wooden fence, across my yard, to the comcast drop, with enough excess wire that it makes standing loops and some switch-backs in the ivy. It's bright orange, though, so not much chance of accidentally mowing it. Been that way for five years. The last service guy didn't bother to put the housing back on the drop, so the connectors sit out in the rain and the snow.

Windows XP lived for 6, 8, or 13 years, depending on how you count. I can see a computer lasting for 6 years (certainly today, though 2001-2007 saw a lot of functional progress), but definitely not 13. Since the retail copy is licensed to a computer, upgrading the computer means buying a new retail copy. Volume licensing lets you just track the number of computers and the number of licenses, and simplifies record keeping. My recollection is that volume licensing had a break-even with a 3-4 year hardware cycle. And there are an awful lot of accountants out there who will recommend a business rent anything rather than buy it just because it looks better on the balance sheet.

I suspect that, among other things, "digital native" means "more comfortable communicating by Facebook and Twitter than by email." Older workers, who started with email and found it to be completely adequate for all their text communication, are completely out of band with text, twitter, snapchat, and this bizarre phenomenon of sending photos of yourself holding hand-written notes.

No one got killed, but even French Christians can be pretty violent over images.

What I want to know is: when did any random loser posting anonymous 60-character messages become a "credible" threat? This seems like the 21st century version of pulling the fire alarm to get out of an exam.